Kint & Natter

Once a month I leave our home for waifs and strays to go to a ‘Knit & natter’ group in another village. I have to say, that more natter than knitting goes on. It is
on these evenings I get a lot of ideas for my books, especially characters. Take for example, Phil the fish.

Now Phil the fish is a man who loves to chat,
usually about fish. He can tell you where in the bay you can get the most mackerel and what tackle is the best to use. An awful subject if you’re a vegetarian!

‘Have you seen Phil the fish lately?’ said Jan the van at the meeting the other night. This is her real name and she is a farmer who drives a van usually full of farm things like straw and animal feed and sometimes the animals
themselves.

I saw him talking to Huw the news in the shop the other night, I replied. They were talking about fish again. No surprise there.

'You have to send your thoughts down the line,’ he was telling Huw, ‘if you want to catch the fish!' Then he looked at me.

I had no intention of catching any fish, I told him, so he talked about women instead or rather, he moaned about the lack of them in his life.

‘Bet he asked you to find him a woman,’ said Bev the bee (you guessed right, she is a bee keeper).

He did, I said, and I promised we would keep an eye out for a woman who liked fishing and boats, especially dirty smelly ones like his.

We all laughed and agreed that this could take forever.

‘What about Dan the man?’ said Bev the Bee, ‘I heard he was having a
hard time on the farm now that his father’s died.’

‘Give him time,’ said Jan the van and he’ll be asking us to find
him a woman too.’ We laughed again but half heartedly, as everyone was fond of Will the milk. He was a true character and would be well missed.

The following ten minutes was spent dissecting poor Don the loaf’s impending divorce and the cause of his marriage breakdown.

‘He’s
spent more time delivering the bread than he did making it,’ someone said, ‘and now we’ll have a generation of children growing up to be bakers!’

We laughed but we knew that that was not the case, Don the loaf was a good man and so was his wife.

We talked a little more about Tom the shoe
and how his business is struggling because of the big stores and we ended with Jack the plasterer, who had fallen off a ladder and broken his leg.

I
was glad my kind an unassuming husband was nowhere to be seen. He would not want to hear the gossip of these women and would be ashamed of my participation. But there was no harm meant, there never is. It’s just the way of village life...a sort of natural
counselling service you could say.

Perhaps knit and natter clubs should open up all over the world. It would certainly do more good
than harm....I think!